


Another World's Insults

by jedi_penguin



Category: The Darwath Series - Barbara Hambly
Genre: Canon-Compliant, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 09:25:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13073958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedi_penguin/pseuds/jedi_penguin
Summary: After the heartbreaking events at Quo, Ingold is kind of a dick.  Rudy notices.Dialogue taken directly fromThe Walls of Air.





	Another World's Insults

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silveronthetree](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveronthetree/gifts).



Rudy had been nauseatingly solicitous ever since Lohiro’s death, but Ingold could see that the boy’s patience was wearing thin. Since he’d never asked his student to double as babysitter, Ingold didn’t give a damn whether he alienated Rudy or not, but he was mildly curious to know what it would take to push the boy over the edge and what he might do once he got there.

But, alas, even that small amount of entertainment was denied him. Instead of giving in to his evident desire to break his jaw, Rudy pasted a look of cultivated patience onto his young face. “Ingold, your mantle is ripped. Why don’t you let me fix that for you? You’ll be warmer.”

“And then you’ll be less embarrassed to be seen with me?” Ingold gave the boy a brittle smile. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to wash my son’s blood out of my cloak while you’re at it? Then I’ll be all set to go to a party!”

Rudy’s eyes flashed, but he limited himself to a quiet, “Of course. I’d be happy to do that for you.”

Taking Ingold’s cloak and mantle, a small twig, and a vine that he had found somewhere, Rudy sat at the far end of the camp and began sewing. At one point, he glanced towards Ingold, who studiously ignored him. Clearly under the impression that Ingold couldn’t hear him, Rudy muttered “prick” to himself before going back to work.

This confused Ingold. Rudy wasn’t holding his hand oddly, or showing any other indication that he had hurt himself with the makeshift needle, so why comment on being pricked? As Ingold concentrated on this minor puzzle, his translation spell gave him a secondary meaning to the word “prick,” namely, “an erect penis, most often used as an insult.”

The people of Darwath didn’t turn body parts into insults, but their neighbors in Alketch did. So, that was an interesting point of comparison between Rudy and Gil’s people and the southern slavers. He’d have to think about that for a while.

~*~*~

The idiot boy spent the better part of the day hunting, only to carelessly burn his hard-won prizes over their small campfire. Since Ingold was in no particular hurry to arrive at the Keep without his fellow wizards in tow, he didn’t give a damn how much time they wasted in their return. His apathy didn’t stop him from criticizing Rudy for the fruitless day, however; after the events at Quo, he chose to take his amusements where he could find them.

His amusement ended when Rudy tried to get him to eat the charcoaled carcasses. “C’mon, man. You gotta eat.”

“Then present me with something edible.”

“Look. I’m sorry I burned it. Okay? I’m sorry. But overcooked or not, it’s all we’ve got. So eat it, damnit!”

Ingold remained unmoved, so Rudy finally moved away from him and left the older man in peace. As he left him, Rudy muttered, “Tool!” under his breath.

The older wizard wasn’t surprised when his translation spell gave him two meanings: “man-made object meant to facilitate work,” and “penis, used as an insult.” Rudy’s people were an odd bunch.

~*~*~  
When baiting Rudy ceased to amuse him, Ingold simply stopped talking. The younger man seemed relieved at first, but soon tired of hearing no voice other than his own. He kept up a steady stream of inane chatter, presumably in the hopes that Ingold would break his self-imposed silence just to snap at him. The boy had no conception of just how immovable his mentor could be when he so desired.

After the third day of ‘the silent treatment,’ as Rudy called it, he finally snapped. “Jesus, Ingold! Why do you gotta be such a dick all the time? I’m sick of it!”

“Dick” translated as “common male name” and, surprise surprise, “penis, most often used as an insult.”

A part of Ingold wanted to ask Rudy why he was so insecure about his manhood that he kept turning it into abusive remarks, but his desire to solve this minor puzzle wasn’t quite strong enough to break through his self-imposed silence. The inertia that had enveloped him from the moment Lohiro died in his arms was getting worse; at this point, it was more than a match for even his curiosity. 

The thought occurred to him that the only thing that kept him putting one foot in front of the other was his interest in learning new insults. It hardly seemed worth the effort.

~*~*~

On the way towards Quo, Ingold had checked on Gil regularly. Sometimes in his crystal, but more often in the flames of their nightly campfires. It had been a soothing ritual, often the best part of his day, but nothing could break through the Walls of Air that surrounded Quo, and so the practice ended once they entered. Afterwards, when they fled Lohiro’s pyre and abandoned the city to the Dark, he found himself searching the flames for his past, times when Quo had been a beacon of knowledge and intellectual pursuits. Visions of happier times fed his grief and guilt, and that was only what he deserved. He didn’t deserve to be cheered by visions of his young friend, but he hadn't intended to go for so long without checking on her. It had now been nearly a month; she deserved better than that.

As soon as Rudy started the evening campfire, Ingold sat down close and tried to call up Gil’s image. She came immediately, walking the corridors of the Keep with the Icefalcon at her side. They both had a slightly relaxed air about them, so clearly neither of them were on duty.

They stopped at a room close to his own. The Icefalcon opened the door and gestured Gil inside. Ingold started to get a bad feeling about what he was watching, but was incapable of turning away from the flames. Once they were both in, the Icefalcon closed the door and immediately went over to Gil. With no prelude whatsoever, he removed Gil’s cloak, vest, then shirt. She stood there passively, neither participating in her undressing nor fighting it.

A wave of jealousy swept over Ingold. He knew that it was unfair and unjustified. He had no claim on Gil Patterson. In fact, he had fled the Keep earlier than he had originally intended specifically to avoid recognizing the burgeoning bond between them. If she had decided to take the Icefalcon to her bed following his cowardly retreat, then his only response should be to congratulate her. The Icefalcon was a good man, one of the few that he’d ever met that could come even close to being worthy of Gil. His inability to be happy for them did not speak well of him at all.

Knowing that he had no business spying on his friends’ intimate moment, Ingold started to banish the vision, but something stopped him. The interaction between Gil and the Icefalcon just wasn’t what he would expect for a seduction. It was... off... The expression on the Icefalcon’s face was far too clinical for lovemaking, and Gil wore a grimace. This was something else.

As Ingold watched, the Icefalcon removed a very large bandage from Gil’s left shoulder. The wound under that bandage was a bloody mess, and Ingold found himself wishing that his initial assumption had been the correct one after all. He couldn’t imagine what force might have done that much damage to his friend’s body, nor how she had survived the injury in the first place. From the look on Gil’s face, it hurt like hell to have the bandage changed, but she never once cried out during the Icefalcon’s ministrations.

After he finished tending to Gil’s wound, the Icefalcon helped her back into her clothes and abruptly left. Gil sat down at a messy table, held her head in her right hand for a long, agonizing moment, then grabbed a book and started making notes on a wax tablet. Ingold suspected that she would continue her scholarly pursuits for the rest of the evening and that there would be nothing more to see if he continued to watch her. So he dismissed the scene from the flames and tried to process what he’d just seen.

Gil had been hurt, **again** , in a fight that wasn’t her own. This injury looked to be far worse than her broken arm had been, and that had damn near killed her. And he couldn’t escape the knowledge that she wouldn’t have been hurt, would never have been in **any** danger at all, if he hadn’t sought her out and asked for her help. There was no way around it: this was his fault.

On the other side of the fire, Rudy picked up Tiannin and began to play the ancient harp. To Ingold’s surprise, he actually produced a passable if melancholy tune. Ingold could have tolerated the playing, but then Rudy began singing some maudlin song in an atonal drone.

_Yesterday_  
_All my troubles seemed so far away_  
_Now it looks as if they’re here to stay_  
_Oh, I believe in yesterday_

Those lyrics hit too close to home; Ingold couldn’t bear them. He got up for a walk and, on a whim, grabbed a bow along with his staff. Perhaps he would do a bit of hunting on his amble. Or perhaps he wouldn’t come back at all. With a bow and his magic, he could live for years in solitude on the steppe. He’d done it before. In all likelihood, the world would have been a better place if he’d just stayed there in the first place.

He walked for about an hour when he came across an outcropping of boulders. He would have liked to have been further away from Rudy, but the boulders made a perfect windbreak and he knew that he’d never find a better place to wait out the night. So he sat down, back against a rock, and proceeded to weigh out the pros and cons of going back to Rudy before dawn.

Surprisingly, Rudy himself showed up before he’d made up his mind. Ingold wouldn’t have guessed that the boy would have the skills to track him; clearly, the younger wizard had learned more than he had realized.

“You planning on coming back to camp tonight?”

God, he was sick of Rudy’s solicitousness. He knew that the boy meant well, but Ingold didn’t want anyone to care for him. He didn’t deserve it. So, as he had many times over the past few weeks, he retreated into rudeness. “Is it any affair of yours?”

Rudy scowled at him, patience clearly reaching a breaking point. “Yeah, I’d kind of like to know if the Dark Ones are gonna put the munch on you.”

“Don’t be stupid.” Ingold fought off a bizarre urge to laugh at the child. “We’ll find violets in this desert before we find the Dark. Or haven’t you been watching?”

“I’ve been watching,” Rudy said sharply. “But I don’t figure I’m that much more clever than the Dark.”

Well, that was certainly true. But then again, he, Ingold, had hardly excelled at outwitting the Dark either. It was knowledge of his own inadequacy that led him to sneer, “What’s the matter, Rudy? Do you think I can’t handle the Dark?”

“No, I don’t.” Ingold couldn’t argue with that assessment, so he didn’t even try. But Rudy wasn’t finished. “I think if it came to that, you’d **love** to get eaten by the Dark. That way you wouldn’t have to go back and tell Alwir the whole thing was a bust, and you’d still get credit for not being a quitter.”

There was a fair bit of truth in Rudy’s hypothesis, so Ingold focused on the one detail where he was in error. “If you think I’d undergo something as unpleasant as that over someone as essentially trivial as Alwir, your sense of proportion is almost as poor as your harp playing. And yes, I was returning tonight.” He hadn’t actually known that he had made that choice until the moment he said it, but Rudy didn’t need to know that.

But the damn boy refused to take his concession and let the matter go. “Then why did you take a bow?” Ingold glared at him, unwilling to admit that he’d almost made another choice. “Or did you figure I could carry the ball from here?”

Ingold had had enough, so he decided to simply tell the boy the truth in the hopes that Rudy would choke on it. ““That’s your choice. You’ve got what you want—you’re a mage, or as much a mage as I can make you.” God help him if Rudy was the best he could do. But then again, he'd trained an archmage who murdered all his fellow teachers, so perhaps it was good that he'd done such a shitty job with Rudy. “You go back and play politics with Alwir. You go back and spin out the illusion that your power gives you either the ability or the right to alter the outcome of things. You go back and watch the people you care for die, either by your own hand or through your damned wretched meddling, and see what it does to you in sixty-three years. But until you do, don’t sit there in self-righteous judgment of me or my actions.”

Rudy didn’t respond to his anger, but simply asked, “So what do I tell them at the Keep?”

“Whatever you please.” God, he was tired. “Tell them I died in Quo. There would be some truth in that, anyway.”

“And is that what I tell Gil?” 

Suddenly, Ingold knew how Lohiro must have felt, to have his trusted Master unexpectedly stab him. “What does Gil have to do with it?”

For as many times as Ingold had wished for an end to Rudy’s treacly concern, it was a little frightening to be on the other side of his anger. He spoke slowly to Ingold, as if the older man were an idiot, and venom dripped from every word. “You’re the only one who can get her back to her own world. You’re the only one in the world who understands the gates through the Void. And **you** were responsible for getting her here in the first place.” Rudy took a deep breath before finishing. “You have no right to be the cause of her being stuck in this universe forever.”

Ingold thought about the vision he had witnessed that afternoon, the one he had seen and misunderstood. “Perhaps it would be Gil’s choice to remain in the world.” She and the Icefalcon would undoubtedly make an excellent pairing were he not around to complicate matters for them. They could be happy. They deserved it.

Rudy was having none of it. “Like hell,” he snorted. “For myself, I don’t give a damn one way or the other. But she’s got a life back there, a career she wants and a place in that world. If she stays here, she’ll never be anything but a foot soldier, when she **wanted** to be a scholar. And she’ll **stay** that way… at least until she gets killed by the Dark. Or the cold. Or by the next stupid war Alwir gets the Keep into.” Ingold was careful to keep a neutral expression on his face, but inside, he was reeling. Every word that Rudy threw at him struck him like a blow, because the younger man was right. About everything. He had destroyed Gil’s life, and the fact that she would never reproach him for doing so somehow made it all worse. And still, Rudy wasn’t finished. “I care for that lady, Ingold,” he said in a menacing tone. “And I’m not going to have you stick her here forever against her will. You haven’t got the **right**.”

Had he looked down upon Rudy as recently as five minutes ago? What a fool he’d been. True, he’d been a fool many times in his life, but his condescension towards his student was particularly stupid. Rudy was showing a clarity in evaluating situations that went far beyond his own. “No,” he sighed in defeat. “You’re right. I suppose I must go back, if only for that.”

Rudy looked oddly disturbed by Ingold's sudden capitulation but didn’t comment on it. He limited himself to a simple, “I’ll be back at the camp. Can you find your way there?”

Ingold nodded, lacking the energy to respond verbally. Apparently as tired of words as he was, Rudy nodded back at him and left in silence. Once he’d moved beyond the hearing of most people (but not beyond Ingold’s), Rudy muttered, “Putz,” under his breath.

Ingold’s trusty translation spell immediately came up “penis,” because of course it did. Like most of Rudy’s insults, it had a secondary meaning, and this one was “a stupid or worthless person.” Yet another thing that Rudy was right about; the young man was on a roll.

As for him, he now had a purpose in life that went beyond learning English words for male genitalia. He had to keep going for Gil. **She** was worth the effort, no matter how tired he was. There would be no rest, no giving up, no surrender until she was back in her own home, surrounded by her books and dirty dishes. And if he coudn't go on once she was gone, well, the desert would still be there, waiting for him.  It was as eternal as his mistakes. He found that oddly comforting.

THE END


End file.
